{"id":4701,"date":"2014-05-07T10:00:51","date_gmt":"2014-05-07T14:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=4701"},"modified":"2014-05-07T08:04:49","modified_gmt":"2014-05-07T12:04:49","slug":"teaching-games-as-text-part-4-the-conclusion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=4701","title":{"rendered":"Teaching Games as Text Part 4: The Conclusion"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the fourth and final part of a series that reflects on a Composition II course taught in Spring 2013 called 20th<\/sup> Century PC Games. You can read part 1 here<\/a>, part 2 here<\/a>, and part 3 here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

As I write this, I\u2019m finishing up another Composition II course that focused on games as text. This course focused more on the rhetorical constructs that shape the conversations around games than on treating the games as literature; although I am pleased with the way both courses worked\u2014and I have no doubt in my mind that my students in both courses came away enriched as critical thinkers and authors for the experience\u2014I have to admit that, from where I stand, the literary approach to games worked better. I changed too many variables to really pin down why, but I suspect part of it comes with the rapid forgetting that our culture is doing even as we strive to cling to \u201cretro\u201d aesthetics and identities in gaming cultures. Without the historical literary perspective, a perspective that divides games into periods and movements, digital games are stuck in a perpetual newness that often makes studying them at once sensational and unapproachable. Our goal as educators should be to normalize the study of so-called pop culture artifacts; after all, these are the things our students encounter most in their daily lives. And here I don\u2019t just want to bring digital games into the classroom; ultimately, we\u2019ll need a holistic, transmedia approach, because ideas and rhetoric does not, in their natural states, limit themselves to one medium at a time. My courses focused exclusively on games, but to teach them I had to also teach my students some rudimentary textual analysis for fiction, poetry, visual art, and cinema. There\u2019s no reason that instructors can\u2019t use games as part of a media suite in their curricula. In fact, that\u2019s probably how, in the long run, games are best incorporated into general education curricula.<\/p>\n

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\"Videogames:<\/a><\/dt>\n
Videogames: Part of a Well-Balanced Media Diet<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n

So You Want to Use Games in Your Classroom? <\/strong><\/h2>\n

(with apologies to Quest for Glory<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n

The most important thing for instructors to remember is that even if our students are digital natives, they are not necessarily fluent with the digital tasks we assign them. In teaching literature at the college level, we start with students who are able to decode the language at the most basic level\u2014they generally consider themselves literate, after all\u2014but when we ask them to explicate a sonnet, we are asking them to use that literacy in a way that is often foreign. So it is with videogames. Students do know how to do the things they have to use technology for regularly\u2014texting, email, simple word processing, watching media, and so forth. But they are not all, by merit of being digital natives, savvy with videogames, digital composition, or the other sorts of tasks we ask of them. But they can<\/em> rise to the occasion.<\/p>\n

And we don\u2019t need to be experts on the material. We don\u2019t need to know all the technical ins and outs of managing videogames as assignments. For illustration, I offer a confession: I\u2019m not only bad with Apple products, I\u2019m also bad at Microsoft\u2019s consoles. This semester I had my students working with an Xbox 360 for a classroom exercise; I couldn\u2019t even turn the thing on (it was apparently being ornery that day). This did not make my lesson any less effective\u2014perhaps it even made it more effective. I passed the controller to a student and commanded: \u201cMake it work.\u201d The student did. Likewise, I often observed students helping each other with various technical issues, both in last year\u2019s course and this year\u2019s. This is the best possible outcome, as students teaching each other creates a better learning environment and ensures that learning happens at a deeper level.<\/p>\n

But there are things we do<\/em> need to do as teachers to make games work in the classroom, things that we will need to prepare in our lessons and curricula. This is the summary of what I learned in teaching these two courses:<\/p>\n